


the land cannot be cleansed

by elumish



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Black Family, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Rebuilding, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 09:25:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8484058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: After the war, they came for Narcissa.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Translation in Russian available [here](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5499113).

After the war, they came for Narcissa. They came for all of the Malfoys, days after the war, after everything had settled down enough for them to have a functioning set of Aurors, and she knew they would come, because the Dark Lord had lived in their house, and they had lived with him. Her son and her husband were easy sells with black on their arms and Unforgiveables on their wands. But Narcissa was not.

After the war, they came for Narcissa, and she greeted them in her sitting room and offered them tea and told them that her husband was upstairs just finishing up some paperwork but her son was in the continent. She didn’t say that if they wanted to get him they would need to find him because she didn’t defy the Dark Lord just to hand over her son to some wand-happy buffoons with a grudge, but she smiled when she offered them sugar in their tea and smiled more when she handed over cups of tea they wouldn’t drink.

They told her that she would have to come with them, ma’am, her and Lucius, and she smiled and rolled up her sleeves to show bare arms and told them that she had saved Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, and did not intend to rot in Azkaban for that. She didn’t tell them that she had poured blood on the wards, on every ward in the house, and if they intended to drag her out they would be fighting Black blood to do so, and Blacks may not always win but they would drag everyone around them down with them.

Her sister had certainly done so.

They left with her husband but without her, left full cups of tea behind, and she sat there and smiled and rolled down her sleeves and drank her own tea.

Potter came next, with apologetic words about how they needed a statement from her, and the Aurors asked him to come, and while he was sitting there sipping his tea he confided in her with a small smile that didn’t do much to fix the abject exhaustion on his face that he thought they were afraid of her. She promised to give a statement. He left, an empty teacup on the table, and she smiled at it.

\--

Narcissa learned young that her ability to smile was her best feature. Dromeda was the smart one and Bella may have been crazy when she grew up but when she was young she was just dedicated. Dedicated to purity, dedicated to the family, cruel and capricious but dedicated to the House of Black and that meant dedicated to Narcissa. Narcissa, though, she was the pretty one, and the one who learned to smile through her teeth while looking like she truly meant it, to smile through Bella’s tantrums and through Dromeda leaving with the unworthy piece of filth she called her husband and through her mother picking for her a man Narcissa didn’t particularly want to marry.

She learned to turn her nose up at certain things, like mudbloods and blood traitors and people who thought they could rise above their station, but more importantly she learned to smile when she was unhappy and smile when she was in pain and smile when she was stone cold furious.

Because you don’t show what makes you happy because then they can take it away from you, and you don’t show what hurts you because then they can force more of it on you, and so if you smile at everything they will never be able to tell.

Some of that she learned in Slytherin, because she might have been a Black but she was the last of the Black women, and Slytherin had seen Dromeda’s fall from grace and the madness in Bella’s eyes and looked at her and wondered if she was next, or when.

But more of it she learned at home, or with her Aunt, and by watching her family go from five to four, and then watching Sirius be cast out. She learned that one must step carefully and know how to smile so that people will stop watching for the Black madness in your eyes and the mudblood between your legs.

At least Sirius had run away to live with a pureblood, even if the family was bordering on being blood traitors. She could hold that solace, even if she had to face the fact that her sister—her once-sister—was touching filth, and worse, doing so voluntarily.

\--

Narcissa sent a letter to Dromeda a month after the war.

They were the only two Blacks left, no matter that Potter was living in the Grimmauld Place house. They were the only two left who were raised as Blacks, who knew what that means, no matter that neither had been a Black in years, no matter that Dromeda was disowned. Blood trumped family, and besides, there was no family left.

Dromeda sent back a carefully worded letter a few days later, empty of all meaning, and Narcissa had the brief, wild thought that their mother would be proud that Dromeda had learned that lesson so well.

When she wrote back, she did not say that. Instead, she said that she wished to reopen a line of communication with Dromeda, that she would like to get to know her again. She did not say that they were the only two Blacks left. She did not say that she was sorry Dromeda’s husband had died, her child had died. She did not say her thought after the war, after they were home, after the Dark Lord was dead, was that she was free.

Many letters later, Dromeda sent her a picture of a baby, sleeping, with hair streaked through with turquoise, and said, he is the grandson of a muggle and the son of a werewolf. Mother would have hated him.

Narcissa sent back a letter saying, good.

\--

Narcissa never expected to like Harry Potter. He was crass and rude and had no idea how to use the power he had been given, the power they had given him. He squandered it and used it on people like her when he could use it on himself, and he was a perfect example of everything purebloods always feared, the product of one of the last truly pure families polluting itself with mudblood blood.

He returned to her house a month after the war, with shadows under his eyes only slightly less dark than the last time she had seen him, with a twitch in his eyes she recognized from when Lucius didn’t sleep, or Draco.

He came with Draco’s wand in a box and apologies on his lips for not returning it sooner, and when she informed him Draco was on the continent something moved in his face like a little piece that had been holding him together broke, and he nodded and handed her the box and began to turn away.

And so she invited him in for tea.

She hadn’t realized how lonely it would get, sitting in that house day after day, alone, Lucius rotting in Azkaban because he had sold their family out and she was through with propping him up to maintain a name that had already been destroyed, Draco away so he was safe, but it was only her and the house elves and the peacocks now, and there was only so much managing of assets she could do before she wanted to rip her hair out.

He stared at her for a long time after she invited him in, an absurdly rude length of time, and then he nodded and traipsed in after her like nobody had ever taught him to straighten his back and hold his head straight enough to balance a book on it, and her first thought was that she would need to teach him.

Right after she taught him not to take tea without checking for potions. Subtly, of course.

The fifth time he came by, he told her how much he hated her house. She informed him that that was a rude thing to tell a host, even if it was true, and he smiled before telling her that he had listened to his friend being tortured here. She smiled back and didn’t tell him that she had been tortured here, by her sister, and that she hated the house, too.

He invited her to the Grimmauld Place house a year after the end of the war, and once there she held a polite conversation with the portrait of her aunt before Blasting it from existence and informing the strange, unexpected, startling boy who was living in her family’s house that that wall had not been loadbearing but she would be willing to provide him with a house elf to create a new one if he wished.

\--

Draco returned from the continent two years after the war with a tan and a potions burn on his left arm and a muggle boyfriend who informed her he was a Prince of Denmark. After the visit was over, Narcissa informed Draco she was disappointed he had only managed a Prince of a secondary line and not one of the sons of the Queen. Her son told her that he had tried, but the Queen’s sons were all disappointingly straight, and prats at that.

Lucius died in Azkaban, so young for a wizard, and Narcissa could not bring herself to feel sorry for his death. She had loved him, she supposed, once, but it was the love of smiling when she was angry at him and smiling when she was sad and smiling when she was happy and only turning up her nose when forced to interact with lesser people.

Narcisssa didn’t marry again, because she didn’t want to, and for the first time in her life she could do what she wanted, and that was to hold Dromeda’s grandson in her arms and watch him change his hair to match hers and growl on the full moon but never transform, and to watch her son marry—not the Prince of Denmark, but a nice pureblood girl, and she fit the word bisexual in her mouth with a smile—and to teach Harry Potter how to use his power like a whip and a blanket, to stand up straight and comb his hair.

And she smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> I really like Narcissa as a character. She's super interesting.


End file.
